Samuel Johnson Birthplace :: Plus44.com Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum. Breadmarket Street, Lichfield Staff WS13 6LG Tel 01542 264972 The house in which Dr Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 is an imposing building in the centre of the charming cathedral city of Lichfield. It now houses a museum dedicated to the life, work and personality of one of England's greatest writers and most fascinating characters. The museum has; Tableaux rooms showing house in early 18c, A video of Johnson's life in the Midlands, many personal belongings, a bookshop, a reading room, manuscripts of Johnson. It also offers an information service on all aspects of life and work of Johnson. (please remember to close window after use) See picture The house is in the centre of Lichfield facing the heritage centre. Lichfield, although very charming, is a very very small city. Lichfield is off the A51 and A38 a few miles north east of Birmingham. Daily 10.30-4.30. Closed Sundays in winter. Ground floor only.

Adults �1.20 Family (2 adults and up to 4 children) �3.20 Please close this window after use by clicking in the corner. Transfer to: Samuel Johnson - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. Samuel Johnson Biography of Samuel Johnson Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), oft-quoted biographer, poet and lexicographer wrote A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), published in two folio volumes. In his time it was the most comprehensive English language dictionary ever compiled and remained the standard reference for over a century. The first edition included a ï¿½Grammar and History of the English Languageï¿½ and thousands of quotations from such authors as John Dryden , William Shakespeare and John Milton to illustrate the use of the over 42,000 words it containedï¿½many more were added in subsequent editions. At a time when literacy rates were improving and the realm of print media was expanding at a rapid pace, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines were becoming available at a reasonable cost.

So, standard spellings, uses and meanings of words such as ï¿½Cough: A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity. It is pronounced coffï¿½ was required among printing houses. Johnson was hired by a group of London booksellers and paid a little over ï¿½1500 to create this ambitious work. Having outlined his A Plan of an English Dictionary in 1747 Johnson, not without his sense of humour added several bon mots to the dictionary including ï¿½Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.ï¿½ The undertaking took almost nine years to complete. I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. (A Dictionary, Preface) By the time it was completed, Johnson was tired of it all and felt snubbed and forgotten. As well as the few advances from the publishing group, Lord Chesterfield patronised him with the paltry sum of ï¿½10 for his efforts.

However, when the publication date was nearing Chesterfield publicly praised it hoping for a dedication. This resulted in Johnsonï¿½s scathing letter, positing many questions including ï¿½Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?ï¿½ Johnsonï¿½s bitterness is noted in several of his definitions including that of Patron: ï¿½One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.ï¿½ While often plagued by the ï¿½black dogï¿½ of melancholia, anxiety and loneliness, financial difficulties and self-doubt, Johnson found his voice in the written wordï¿½little did he know it would still be heard over two centuries later. From humble beginnings as the son of a bookseller, Johnson became one of the most widely respected 18th century scholars. Like his father he was a High Churchman and showed tolerance to those outside of his faith.

From Oxford University he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree in 1755 and a Doctor of Laws degree in 1775; Trinity College, Dublin bestowed upon him with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1765. He wrote fiction and nonï¿½his works covering subjects as varied as theatre, biography, politics, religion, and travel as well as French, Latin, Greek, and Italian translations. Upon the successful publication of his Dictionary Johnson enjoyed the esteem of Londonï¿½s literary circle and became great friends with many other prominent men of the time including Adam Smith , Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith with whom he founded the ï¿½Clubï¿½, later known as the Literary Club. During the course of their friendship, Scottish lawyer and author James Boswell (1740-1795) wrote the definitive biography of his friend titled The Life of Johnson (1791). As I had the honour and happiness of enjoying his friendship for upwards of twenty years....I have spared no pains in obtaining materials concerning him....and have been favoured with the most liberal communications by his friends....

I trust, I shall not be accused of affectation, when I declare, that I find myself unable to express all that I felt upon the loss of such a ï¿½Guide, Philosopher, and Friend.ï¿½ I shall, therefore, not say one word of my own, but adopt those of an eminent friend, which he uttered with an abrupt felicity, superior to all studied compositions:ï¿½He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best:ï¿½there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson. (ibid.) Doctor Samuel Johnson LL.D. was born on 18 September 1709 at the home his father built (now the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum) which also housed his fatherï¿½s bookshop. It stands at the corner of Breadmarket Street and Market Square in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. Samuel was the first son born to Sarah Ford (1699-1759) and Michael Johnson (1657-1731).

His brother Nathaniel was born in 1712 (d.1737). The early years for young Samuel and his family were difficultï¿½his father, a well-read and respected businessman also served as Magistrate of Lichfield for a time but suffered financial woes and Samuel had been born a rather sickly child. After being sent to a wet nurse he suffered a bout of scrophula or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes, then later smallpox, which caused physical disfigurements. Sarah, who believed as so many others did at the time that the royal touch had healing powers, brought her son to London to be touched by Queen Anne. However, off and on for the rest of his life various ailments including tics, poor hearing and eyesight, and depression plagued Johnson. He often went on long walks or went swimming or horseback riding to alleviate his gloomy moods. Johnson found much enjoyment reading the numerous books lining the shelves of his fatherï¿½s store, and his interest in literature further developed whilst attending the Lichfield and Stourbridge grammar schools where he studied the classics.

At the age of nineteen he entered Pembroke College at Oxford to study languages and law but had to leave in 1731 due to financial constraints. After his father Michaelï¿½s death the same year, Johnson continued to seek his place in the world; impoverished and with no completed formal training, he listlessly travelled about trying to obtain a position as teacher. While he did do some teaching and tutoring none of his positions held long-term. He could be an impatient man with occasional angry outbursts, but overall he was known for being kind to those less fortunate than he, sometimes to his great expense. Residing in Birmingham in the West Midlands with this friend Edmund Hector, Johnson turned his hand to writing. A Voyage to Abyssinia, his translation from the Portuguese of Jesuit Father Jerome Loboï¿½s travels was published in 1735. On 9 July 1735 at St. Werburghï¿½s Church in Derby, East Midlands, Johnson married the widowed Elizabeth ï¿½Tettyï¿½ Jervis nï¿½e Porter (1689-1752), twenty years his senior.

Although the couple did not have children Elizabeth had three from her previous marriage. Boswell notes that Johnson ï¿½became the fervent admirer of Mrs. Porter, after her first husbandï¿½s deathï¿½ and relates Miss [Lucy, Elizabeth's daughter] Porterï¿½s first impression of him; ....his appearance was very forbidding: he was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrophula were deeply visible. He also wore his hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind: and he often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprize and ridicule. (The Life of Johnson) Boswell goes on to say; Mrs. Porter was so much engaged by his conversation that she overlooked all these external disadvantages, and said to her daughter, ï¿½this is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.ï¿½(ibid.) Boswell also tells us of David Garrickï¿½s (1717-1779) not so flattering impressions of Tetty.

Whether she was of florid and coarse appearance and provincial airs or not, Samuel said ï¿½it was a love marriage on both sides.ï¿½ (ibid.) Tetty was plump and outgoing, ï¿½fantastick in her dressï¿½ (ibid.) and tended to the ï¿½liberal use of cordials.ï¿½ (ibid.) Samuel loved her for her beauty, patience and devotion to him. She was supportive of him in his pursuits, emotionally and financially, as in when he attempted to establish a school at Edial, just outside of Lichfield where the Johnsons had settled. The undertaking lasted just over a year. Garrick was one of the three pupils who had enrolled and would become a famous actor and friend to Johnson. With the schools closure Samuel was again faced with the need to make a major decision in his life regarding occupation. Leaving Elizabeth behind temporarily and with the intention of furthering his education and studying law, he travelled to London. He had little money in his pocket but with the encouragement of friends and making the acquaintance of genteel company he gathered his resources to establish himself.

He wrote to Gentlemenï¿½s Magazine publisher Edward Cave hoping to garner interest in his writing, for while he was working on his play Irene (1737) [which Garrick produced in 1749] Johnson had also started to write theatre and book reviews, essays, and news items. When he was hired by Cave in 1738 as a journalist he also turned his pen to politics. Included in the many subjects he wrote of were America, censorship, taxation, and slavery. With notes from a collaborator who attended the debates, Johnson evokes Jonathan Swift ï¿½s (1667-1745) Gulliverï¿½s Travels in his series of Parliamentary Reports disguised as from ï¿½The Senate of Lilliputï¿½. The debates were kept under secrecy from the public at the time and it was illegal to reproduce them in print, hence it was a true test of Johnsonï¿½s ability to craft imaginative and satiric works.

Other magazines he contributed to were The Adventurer (between the years 1752 and 1754) and The Idler (from 1758-1760). After a time Elizabeth joined him in London where they both lived for the rest of their lives although they maintained a house in Lichfield. Johnsonï¿½s ï¿½London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenalï¿½ï¿½ï¿½Of all the Griefs that harrass the Distrest, Sure the most bitter is a scornful Jestï¿½ was printed in Gentlemenï¿½s Magazine in May of 1738. He was paid ten guineas and it earned him notable recognition from fellow writers including he ï¿½who then filled the poetical throne without a rivalï¿½ (Life of Johnson) Alexander Pope. Although he was now earning a fairly regular income from Gentlemenï¿½s money was still tight at times and he never forgot the financial straits and degradations he went through just a few years earlier.

His biography of fellow writer and friend Richard Savage (c.1697-1743) Life of Savage was published in 1744 and illuminates the desperate struggle and oftentimes disappointing life of a writer in London. Other works written during this period include A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739) and The Life of Admiral Blake (1740). In 1748 and now living comfortably with their servant Mr. Francis Barber (c.1735-1801) at 17 Gough Square just off of Fleet Street (now known as the Dr. Johnsonï¿½s House Museum), Johnson set to the formidable task of compiling his Dictionary. While it took much of his time, probably to take a break from the mundane aspect of it he worked on other writing projects and assisted other writers. The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal was published in 1749, The Life of Edward Cave in 1752. He also produced a number of essays published in his own periodical The Rambler between the years 1850-1852.

On 28 March 1752 his beloved Tetty died; she now rests at the Bromley Parish Church cemetery in Kent County. Near the end of his life Johnson had her gravestone inscribed thus; ï¿½Hic conduntur reliquiï¿½ Elizabethï¿½ antiquï¿½ Jarvisiorum gente, Peatlingï¿½ apud Leicestrienses ortï¿½, formosï¿½, cultï¿½, ingeniosï¿½, piï¿½, uxoris primis nuptiis Henrici Porter, secundis Samuelis Johnson, qui multï¿½m amatam diuque defletam hoc lapide contexit. Obiit Londini, mense Mart. A. D. 1753.ï¿½ (Dr. Johnsonï¿½s Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1) Johnsonï¿½s grief was profound yet he could not bear to attend her funeral; for the rest of his life he kept her wedding ring close at hand in a special wooden box.

In 1759 Johnsonï¿½s mother Sarah died, the same year his satirical Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia was published. Other works to follow were The Life of Ascham (1761), Notes to Shakespeare (1765) and The Fountains: A Fairy Tale (1766). In 1762 he was granted an annual government pension of ï¿½300. Around the time Johnson met Boswell he also made the acquaintance of Henry and Hester Thrale who became good friends and support to the now widowed Johnson. Throughout the 70ï¿½s he continued writing on politics including The False Alarm (1770), Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falklandï¿½s Islands (1771), The Patriot (1774), and Taxation No Tyranny (1775). Based on his travels in Scotland with Boswell, Johnson wrote A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1773). Prayers and Meditations was published in 1785.

His series Lives of the Poets published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781 earned much acclaim. Included are biographies of William Congreve , Sir John Denham, John Dryden , David Mallet, John Milton , Thomas Otway, Jonathan Swift , and Alexander Pope. Samuel Johnson died on 13 December 1784 and now rests in Poetï¿½s Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, England. ï¿½This recommendation of steadiness and uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.ï¿½ (from his Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language) Biography written by C. D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2007. All Rights Reserved. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission.

Forum Discussions on Samuel Johnson Recent Forum Posts on Samuel Johnson About Johnson | Samuel Johnson as a young man © Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) Samuel Johnson, author, lexicographer and wit, was one of Britain’s leading literary figures in the 18th century. Johnson was the author of the Dictionary of the English Language, Rasselas and Lives of the Poets. He also edited and was a commentator on Shakespeare’s plays. By the time of his death, Johnson was acknowledged as one of the most influential figures in English literature. The years from approximately 1755 to 1784 are often referred to as the Age of Johnson. Early Life He was born the son of Michael and Sarah Johnson in Lichfield, a cathedral city in the Midlands, on 18 September 1709 (7 September old style). His father was a bookseller whose circumstances fluctuated and the family was never financially secure. He was a sickly child, who had smallpox and scrofula, and was left with the affects of childhood illness throughout his adult life. Johnson was often afflicted by bouts of melancholy.

He was a brilliant young scholar and attended Pembroke College, Oxford, but was forced to leave without a degree when money ran out. On a happier note he married Elizabeth (‘Tetty’) Porter in 1735. His attempt to start his own school at Edial near Lichfield failed and, along with a former pupil, one David Garrick, he set off for London to seek his fortune as a writer. London 1737-1762 Johnson began to build a reputation with articles for The Gentleman’s Magazine, the poem London (1738), works of political satire, reports of parliamentary debates and, in 1744, The Life of Savage. In 1746 he signed the contract for the Dictionary. The poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, appeared in 1749. The famous Rambler essays followed in 1750. His wife died in 1752. Although the Dictionary was published successfully in two volumes in 1755, he continued to experience financial difficulties. He wrote Rasselas in a short time in order to defray his mother’s funeral expenses.

However, in 1762 he was awarded a pension of some £300 per annum by the King. For the first time in his life he was financially secure. © Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum The Celebrity Years 1762-1785 Johnson was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, Dublin, in 1765 and was subsequently known as Dr Johnson. During his later years he edited Shakespeare and wrote The Lives of the Poets. His friends included many of the leading figures of the age such as Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick, and he became famous as a wit and conversationalist. In 1763 he met the young Scotsman, James Boswell, who recorded much of his conversation. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which was published in 1791, is widely regarded as the greatest literary biography in the English language. It celebrates its subject as a man of remarkable talents and common human weaknesses. Johnson died on 13 December 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey . Search for: The History of Samuel Johnson, Lichfield ONLINE SHOP!

Lichfield's greatest son was born on 18th September, 1709 in his father's house in Breadmarket Street. His early years were difficult - his parents were beset by financial problems - but from the books in his father's shop he found comfort and instruction, preparing him for his role as the century's greatest man of letters. His education at Lichfield and Stourbridge Grammar Schools gave him an excellent introduction to classical literature, but a brief period at Pembroke College, Oxford, was brought to a hurried conclusion by financial difficulties and increasing depression. A fruitless search for schoolteaching work in the Midlands made him drift into a writing career in journalism and translation in Birmingham and London. It was in Birmingham that he met Elizabeth Porter whom he was later to marry. She was twenty years older than Samuel, with three grown-up children from a previous marriage. An attempt by Samuel and Elizabeth to set up a school outside Lichfield failed and led to the couple's removal to London. Following several years of hack-work writing in London, Johnson was offered the major task of compiling an English Dictionary, a project which brought him fame though little financial reward.

His years of struggle ended with the award of a government pension of ï¿½300 a year. In the later years of his life he became, to some extent, public property, being sought by the famous and the obscure for his advice on literary and worldly problems. The backbone of these years was his friendship with Henry and Hester Thrale, in whose houses he found comfort and a family in whose affairs he could interest himself. The conviviality of this part of his life, however - reflected in his friendships with men and women like James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Fanny Burney - masked a fear of solitude and mental anguish. His last years were sad, being characterised by illness, the death of his close friends, and the breakdown of his friendship with Hester Thrale. Although a profoundly religious man, he was fearful of his fate in the afterlife, and only on his death bed did he start to come to terms with his death. He died a national celebrity, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

"Characters should never be given by an historian, unless he knew the people whom he describes, or copies from those who knew them" Priority Management: Priority Management: Samuel Johnson Read here SAMUEL JOHNSON Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), oft-quoted biographer, poet and lexicographer wrote A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), published in two folio volumes. In his time it was the most comprehensive English language dictionary ever compiled and remained the standard reference for over a century. The first edition included a “Grammar and History of the English Language” and thousands of quotations from such authors as John Dryden, William Shakespeare and John Milton to illustrate the use of the over 42,000 words it contained – many more were added in subsequent editions. At a time when literacy rates were improving and the realm of print media was expanding at a rapid pace, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines were becoming available at a reasonable cost. So, standard spellings, uses and meanings of words such as ‘Cough: A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity. It is pronounced coff’ was required among printing houses.

Johnson was hired by a group of London booksellers and paid a little over £1500 to create this ambitious work. Having outlined his A Plan of an English Dictionary in 1747 Johnson, not without his sense of humour added several bon mots to the dictionary including ‘Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.’ The undertaking took almost nine years to complete. I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. (A Dictionary, Preface) By the time it was completed, Johnson was tired of it all and felt snubbed and forgotten. As well as the few advances from the publishing group, Lord Chesterfield patronised him with the paltry sum of £10 for his efforts. However, when the publication date was nearing Chesterfield publicly praised it hoping for a dedication.

This resulted in Johnson’s scathing letter, positing many questions including ‘Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a Man struggling for Life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?’ Johnson’s bitterness is noted in several of his definitions including that of Patron: ‘One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.’ While often plagued by the ‘black dog’ of melancholia, anxiety and loneliness, financial difficulties and self-doubt, Johnson found his voice in the written word – little did he know it would still be heard over two centuries later. From humble beginnings as the son of a bookseller, Johnson became one of the most widely respected 18th century scholars. Like his father he was a High Churchman and showed tolerance to those outside of his faith. From Oxford University he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree in 1755 and a Doctor of Laws degree in 1775; Trinity College, Dublin bestowed upon him with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1765.

He wrote fiction and non – his works covering subjects as varied as theatre, biography, politics, religion, and travel as well as French, Latin, Greek, and Italian translations. Upon the successful publication of his Dictionary Johnson enjoyed the esteem of London’s literary circle and became great friends with many other prominent men of the time including Adam Smith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith with whom he founded the “Club”, later known as the Literary Club. During the course of their friendship, Scottish lawyer and author James Boswell (1740-1795) wrote the definitive biography of his friend titled The Life of Johnson (1791). As I had the honour and happiness of enjoying his friendship for upwards of twenty years....I have spared no pains in obtaining materials concerning him....and have been favoured with the most liberal communications by his friends....

I trust, I shall not be accused of affectation, when I declare, that I find myself unable to express all that I felt upon the loss of such a ‘Guide, Philosopher, and Friend.’ I shall, therefore, not say one word of my own, but adopt those of an eminent friend, which he uttered with an abrupt felicity, superior to all studied compositions: – He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: – there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson. (ibid.) Doctor Samuel Johnson LL.D. was born on 18 September 1709 at the home his father built (now the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum) which also housed his father’s bookshop. It stands at the corner of Breadmarket Street and Market Square in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. Samuel was the first son born to Sarah Ford (1699-1759) and Michael Johnson (1657-1731). His brother Nathaniel was born in 1712 (d.1737).

The early years for young Samuel and his family were difficult – his father, a well-read and respected businessman also served as Magistrate of Lichfield for a time but suffered financial woes and Samuel had been born a rather sickly child. After being sent to a wet nurse he suffered a bout of scrophula or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes, then later smallpox, which caused physical disfigurements. Sarah, who believed as so many others did at the time that the royal touch had healing powers, brought her son to London to be touched by Queen Anne. However, off and on for the rest of his life various ailments including tics, poor hearing and eyesight, and depression plagued Johnson. He often went on long walks or went swimming or horseback riding to alleviate his gloomy moods. Johnson found much enjoyment reading the numerous books lining the shelves of his father’s store, and his interest in literature further developed whilst attending the Lichfield and Stourbridge grammar schools where he studied the classics. At the age of nineteen he entered Pembroke College at Oxford to study languages and law but had to leave in 1731 due to financial constraints.

After his father Michael’s death the same year, Johnson continued to seek his place in the world; impoverished and with no completed formal training, he listlessly travelled about trying to obtain a position as teacher. While he did do some teaching and tutoring none of his positions held long-term. He could be an impatient man with occasional angry outbursts, but overall he was known for being kind to those less fortunate than he, sometimes to his great expense. Residing in Birmingham in the West Midlands with this friend Edmund Hector, Johnson turned his hand to writing. A Voyage to Abyssinia, his translation from the Portuguese of Jesuit Father Jerome Lobo’s travels was published in 1735. On 9 July 1735 at St. Werburgh’s Church in Derby, East Midlands, Johnson married the widowed Elizabeth ‘Tetty’ Jervis née Porter (1689-1752), twenty years his senior. Although the couple did not have children Elizabeth had three from her previous marriage. Boswell notes that Johnson ‘became the fervent admirer of Mrs.

Porter, after her first husband’s death’ and relates Miss [Lucy, Elizabeth’s daughter] Porter’s first impression of him; ....his appearance was very forbidding: he was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrophula were deeply visible. He also wore his hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind: and he often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprize and ridicule. (The Life of Johnson) Boswell goes on to say; Mrs. Porter was so much engaged by his conversation that she overlooked all these external disadvantages, and said to her daughter, ‘this is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life.’(ibid.) Boswell also tells us of David Garrick’s (1717-1779) not so flattering impressions of Tetty.

Whether she was of florid and coarse appearance and provincial airs or not, Samuel said ‘it was a love marriage on both sides.’ (ibid.) Tetty was plump and outgoing, ‘fantastick in her dress’ (ibid.) and tended to the ‘liberal use of cordials.’ (ibid.) Samuel loved her for her beauty, patience and devotion to him. She was supportive of him in his pursuits, emotionally and financially, as in when he attempted to establish a school at Edial, just outside of Lichfield where the Johnsons had settled. The undertaking lasted just over a year. Garrick was one of the three pupils who had enrolled and would become a famous actor and friend to Johnson. With the schools closure Samuel was again faced with the need to make a major decision in his life regarding occupation. Leaving Elizabeth behind temporarily and with the intention of furthering his education and studying law, he travelled to London. He had little money in his pocket but with the encouragement of friends and making the acquaintance of genteel company he gathered his resources to establish himself.

He wrote to Gentlemen’s Magazine publisher Edward Cave hoping to garner interest in his writing, for while he was working on his play Irene (1737) [which Garrick produced in 1749] Johnson had also started to write theatre and book reviews, essays, and news items. When he was hired by Cave in 1738 as a journalist he also turned his pen to politics. Included in the many subjects he wrote of were America, censorship, taxation, and slavery. With notes from a collaborator who attended the debates, Johnson evokes Jonathan Swift’s (1667-1745) Gulliver’s Travels in his series of Parliamentary Reports disguised as from “The Senate of Lilliput”. The debates were kept under secrecy from the public at the time and it was illegal to reproduce them in print, hence it was a true test of Johnson’s ability to craft imaginative and satiric works.

Other magazines he contributed to were The Adventurer (between the years 1752 and 1754) and The Idler (from 1758-1760).(ibid.) After a time Elizabeth joined him in London where they both lived for the rest of their lives although they maintained a house in Lichfield. Johnson’s “London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal” – ‘Of all the Griefs that harrass the Distrest, Sure the most bitter is a scornful Jest’ was printed in Gentlemen’s Magazine in May of 1738. He was paid ten guineas and it earned him notable recognition from fellow writers including he ‘who then filled the poetical throne without a rival’ (Life of Johnson) Alexander Pope. Although he was now earning a fairly regular income from Gentlemen’s money was still tight at times and he never forgot the financial straits and degradations he went through just a few years earlier.

His biography of fellow writer and friend Richard Savage (c.1697-1743) Life of Savage was published in 1744 and illuminates the desperate struggle and oftentimes disappointing life of a writer in London. Other works written during this period include A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (1739) and The Life of Admiral Blake (1740). In 1748 and now living comfortably with their servant Mr. Francis Barber (c.1735-1801) at 17 Gough Square just off of Fleet Street (now known as the Dr. Johnson’s House Museum), Johnson set to the formidable task of compiling his Dictionary. While it took much of his time, probably to take a break from the mundane aspect of it he worked on other writing projects and assisted other writers. The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal was published in 1749, The Life of Edward Cave in 1752. He also produced a number of essays published in his own periodical The Rambler between the years 1850-1852.

On 28 March 1752 his beloved Tetty died; she now rests at the Bromley Parish Church cemetery in Kent County. Near the end of his life Johnson had her gravestone inscribed thus; ‘Hic conduntur reliquiæ Elizabethæ antiquâ Jarvisiorum gente, Peatlingæ; apud Leicestrienses ortæ, formosæ, cultæ, ingeniosæ, piæ, uxoris primis nuptiis Henrici Porter, secundis Samuelis Johnson, qui multúm amatam diuque defletam hoc lapide contexit. Obiit Londini, mense Mart. A. D. 1753.’ (Dr. Johnson’s Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1) Johnson’s grief was profound yet he could not bear to attend her funeral; for the rest of his life he kept her wedding ring close at hand in a special wooden box. In 1759 Johnson’s mother Sarah died, the same year his satirical Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia was published.

Other works to follow were The Life of Ascham (1761), Notes to Shakespeare (1765) and The Fountains: A Fairy Tale (1766). In 1762 he was granted an annual government pension of £300. Around the time Johnson met Boswell he also made the acquaintance of Henry and Hester Thrale who became good friends and support to the now widowed Johnson. Throughout the 70’s he continued writing on politics including The False Alarm (1770), Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771), The Patriot (1774), and Taxation No Tyranny (1775). Based on his travels in Scotland with Boswell, Johnson wrote A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1773). Prayers and Meditations was published in 1785. His series Lives of the Poets published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781 earned much acclaim. Included are biographies of William Congreve, Sir John Denham, John Dryden, David Mallet, John Milton, Thomas Otway, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope.

Samuel Johnson died on 13 December 1784 and now rests in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, England. “This recommendation of steadiness and uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” (from his Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language) The Jamaican slave who became Samuel Johnson's heir 28 May 2015 The Jamaican slave who became Samuel Johnson's heir In 1752, Johnson’s low spirits were relieved somewhat by the arrival from Jamaica of Francis Barber.

Sign up for our weekly email * The Fortunes of Francis Barber: the True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir Michael Bundock Yale University Press, 296pp, £20 Samuel Johnson, the great John Bull of 18th-century letters, was wary of all things fandangled, not least the fashion coming out of France (a land of “fopdoodles” and, in the pickpocket vernacular of the time, “dandiprats”). Johnson the gruff Tory patriot was a depressive who used alcohol as a balm for his awful blue moods. His fear-ridden, devoutly Christian soul intrigued Samuel Beckett, for one, whose unfinished 1937 play Human Wishes explored Johnson’s friendship with his biographer Hester Thrale, the wife of the Italian music teacher Gabriel Piozzi. In 1752, Johnson’s low spirits were relieved somewhat by the arrival from Jamaica of a “Black a Moor” (wrote Thrale) named Francis Barber, who became his valet and, later, the principal beneficiary of his will.

By employing a Caribbean slave, Johnson felt he could exercise Britain’s fundamental principle of liberty (as he saw it) and show a true Christian compassion. Johnson’s anti­pathy to slavery was genuine, even if it was expressed through table talk rather than in books. The sugar-rich Jamaica, in his lofty view, was “a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness”, whose plantation system was a stigma on the English-speaking peoples. In 1777, he shocked an Oxford dinner party by proposing a toast to “the next insurrection of Negroes” in the British Caribbean. Johnson was, in the current coinage, a “compassionate conservative” who delighted in championing the underdog. Barber’s story has been told many times and Charles Nicholl is at work on a new book about him. In the meantime, we can enjoy Michael Bundock’s The Fortunes of Francis Barber, a work of punctilious archival research. As Bundock reminds us, Barber had been entrusted to Johnson by a sugar planter with connections in Jamaica, Colonel Richard Bathurst.

A full half-century before the abolition of slavery, Barber was instructed to wait on Johnson at his table, answer his door and provide him with a distraction from the “black dog” of depression. Barber’s household duties were not, as Bundock writes, “very taxing”. In slavery-era Britain, Johnson indulged his Jamaican charge in a way that few other Anglican Tories would have considered proper. Johnson refused to let Barber buy fish for his cat, Hodge, as he did not want him to have to attend on an animal; he paid for his education and, after more than 20 years of service, favoured him with the bulk of his estate. In gratitude, Barber named his first son Samuel and settled in Johnson’s birthplace of Lichfield, where he achieved some note as a Methodist minister and head of a local school (Barber, Bundock speculates, was the “first black schoolmaster in Britain”). Today, Barber’s descendants are alive and well and living around the Midlands – but they all appear to be white.

When Barber arrived in England in 1750, Johnson was at work on A Dictionary of the English Language, which since its inception in 1747 had swollen into a lexical juggernaut containing more than 42,000 entries. The dictionary’s functional clarity and comprehensiveness remain impressive even today. Bundock brings to life the teeming humanity around Johnson’s house off Fleet Street, where his six amanuenses struggled to put the lexicon together. Personal vanities and animosities distracted Johnson and his helpers from their task. Inevitably, Barber was present at the disagreements that flared among the printers, etchers, bookbinders, typesetters and, notably, the dictionary’s fair-weather patron, the Earl of ­Chesterfield, whom Johnson came to see as a dolt puffed up by vanity and self-interest. While other English dictionaries had existed before Johnson’s (notably Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of 1728), Johnson’s was the first that could be read with pleasure and it helped to establish a national standard English at a time when “Britishness” was a fledgling but important idea.

As a black man in Georgian Britain, Barber would have stood out among the Grub Street scribblers, spirit shops and tippling houses that made up the metropolitan ant heap around Johnson’s house. Johnson’s own ungainly physique and awkward, rolling gait might have endeared him to the outsider Barber. Theirs was in many ways a father-son relationship, with all the “intimacy, possessiveness, exasperation and love” that such a relationship entails. With Barber hovering deferentially at his elbow, Johnson lost no opportunity to trumpet his anti-imperialist sentiments. The usefulness of the British colonies in slave-owning America was, Johnson reckoned, “questionable”; he may even have favoured Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt in 1745 to wrest the British crown from the Hanoverian monarchy. Such nonconformity did not always endear Johnson to his contemporaries. His dictionary, fortified by a subversive irony and a little clotted nonsense, contained many opinionated gibes against pomposity and cant.

When Francis Barber died in 1801 in Staffordshire, at the age of 57 or 58, he was the father of two mixed-race children (his wife, Elizabeth Ball, was entirely white). In some ways, Barber looked forward to the multi-shaded, multi-ethnic Britain of today, which has proportionately one of the largest mixed-race populations in the western world. Bundock’s tale of “white-black interaction” in the Georgian period, written with a Johnsonian clarity and verve, absorbs from start to finish. This article first appeared in the 21 May 2015 issue of the New Statesman, The real opposition Most Popular Close This week’s magazine SIPA PRESS/REX 19 January 2017 "By now, there was no way back for me": the strange story of Bogdan Stashinsky Serhii Plokhy’s The Man with the Poison Gun is a gripping, remarkable Cold War spy story.

Sign up for our weekly email * Print HTML On the morning of 12 August 1961, a few hours before the supreme leader of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht, announced the sealing of the border between East and West Berlin, a funeral took place for a four-month-old boy at the Rohrbeck Evangelical Cemetery in Dallgow. Numerous KGB agents and officers of the East German ministry of security were in attendance, but the boy’s parents were missing. Instead, Bogdan Stashinsky and Inge Pohl were preparing their imminent escape from Soviet-occupied territory and into the West. They had intended to flee the following day, but the funeral provided a moment of opportunity when their surveillance was relaxed. If they wanted to go, they had to go now. “The KGB operatives present at the child’s funeral were puzzled by the parents’ absence,” a Soviet intelligence officer later wrote. “By the end of the day on 13 August 1961, it was clear that the Stashinskys had gone to the West.

Everyone who knew what tasks the agent had carried out in Munich in 1957 and 1959, and what could happen if Stashinsky were to talk, was in shock.” Those “tasks” were the state-sponsored assassinations of Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, two exiled leaders of the Ukrainian anti-communist movement who had been living in Munich. Stashinsky, one of the KGB’s top hitmen, and the focus of Serhii Plokhy’s gripping book, had been given the task of tracking and killing them with a custom-built gun that sprayed a lethal, yet undetectable poison. It was only after Stashinsky’s defection to the Central Intelligence Agency, and then to the West German security services, that the cause of Rebet and Bandera’s deaths was finally known. For decades, the KGB denied any involvement in the assassinations, and the CIA has never been entirely sure about Stashinsky’s motives. Was he telling the truth when he confessed to being the assassin, or was he, as some still claim, a loyal agent, sent to spread disinformation and protect the true killer? Plokhy has now put to rest the many theories and speculations.

With great clarity and compassion, and drawing from a trove of recently declassified files from CIA, KGB and Polish security archives, as well as interviews conducted with former heads of the South African police force, he chronicles one of the most curious espionage stories of the Cold War. Stashinsky’s tale is worthy of John le Carré or Ian Fleming. Plokhy even reminds us that The Man With the Golden Gun, in which James Bond tries to assassinate his boss with a cyanide pistol after being brainwashed by the Soviets, was inspired by the Stashinsky story. But if spy novels zero in on a secret world – tradecraft, double agents, defections, and the moral fallout that comes from working in the shadows – Plokhy places this tale in the wider context of the Cold War and the relentless ideological battle between East and West. The story of Stashinsky’s career as a triggerman for the KGB plays out against the backdrop of the fight for Ukrainian independence after the Second World War. He was a member of the underground resistance against the Soviet occupation, but was forced to become an informer for the secret police after his family was threatened.

After he betrayed a resistance cell led by Ivan Laba, which had assassinated the communist author Yaroslav Halan, Stashinsky was ostracised by his family and was offered the choice of continuing his higher education, which he could no longer afford, or joining the secret police. “It was [only] a proposal,” he said later, “but I had no alternative to accepting it and continuing to work for the NKVD. By now, there was no way back for me.” He received advanced training in Kyiv and Moscow for clandestine work in the West and became one of Moscow’s most prized assets. In 1957, after assassinating Rebet, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, one of the oldest military decorations in the Soviet Union. Plokhy’s book is about more than the dramas of undercover work; it is also an imaginative approach to the history of Cold War international relations. It is above all an affective tale about the relationship between individual autonomy and state power, and the crushing impact the police state had on populations living behind the Iron Curtain.

Stashinsky isn’t someone of whom we should necessarily approve: he betrayed his comrades in the Ukrainian resistance, lied to his family about who he was and killed for a living. Yet we sympathise with him the more he, like so many others, turns into a defenceless pawn of the Communist Party high command, especially after he falls in love with his future wife, Inge. One of the most insightful sections of Plokhy’s book converges on Stashinsky’s trial in West Germany in 1962 over the killings of Rebet and Bandera, and how he was given a reduced sentence because it was deemed that he had been an instrument of the Soviet state. The decision was influenced by German memories of collective brainwashing under the Third Reich. As one of the judges put it: “The accused was at the time in question a poor devil who acted automatically under pressure of commands and was misled and confused ideologically.” What makes Plokhy’s book so alarmingly resonant today is how Russia still uses extrajudicial murder as a tool of foreign policy.

In 2004 Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-Western future president of Ukraine, was poisoned with dioxin; two years later Aleksandr Litvinenko, the Russian secret service defector, unknowingly drank radioactive polonium at a hotel in London. The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya survived a poisoning in 2004 after drinking tea given to her by an Aeroflot flight attendant (she was murdered two years later). The collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring the end of the Russian threat (Putin, remember, is ex-KGB). As le Carré noted in a speech in the summer of 1990, “The Russian Bear is sick, the Bear is bankrupt, the Bear is frightened of his past, his present and his future. But the Bear is still armed to the teeth and very, very proud.” The Man with the Poison Gun: a Cold War Spy Story by Serhii Plokhy is published by Oneworld (365pp, £18.99)

Question: In which midlands city was Samuel Johnson born?
Answer: Lichfield